It's probably very obvious to readers of this website that People with Tourette's have it tough. I'm not denying that, nor do I wish to turn it into a martyr type thing. We are who we are and sometimes it's good to remember the advantages to our little friend TS.
Often Tourette syndrome comes with some sort of learning disability, but for those who aren't affected this way there seems to be an opposite effect. There are some very brainy Touretters out there. Samuel Johnstone and Mozart are both believed to have been Touretters, and stories flood in of Touretter surgeons, journalists, politicians, engineers, and most of all health carers. There seems to be a compelling need in many adult Touretters to study their own condition, so the collection of psychiatrists, psychologists, neurologists, dieticians, psychiatric nurses and social workers is amazing.
Touretters seem to be generally better at the spatial side of things. That is, they are able to do things like speak backwards, rotate shapes in their minds and they can be good at decoding. As men are generally considered to be better at spatial tasks than women, and it seems Touretters have higher levels of male hormone than the general population this is possibly an androgen thing.
It seems that movements
are not the only thing reinforced by excess dopamine receptors. Random
firings of neurons, described elsewhere on this site,
reinforce memories as well. Without even thinking about it, some
Touretters memorize conversations. When given the appropriate
reminder, it can be possible to recount a conversation word for word.
This can, admittedly, be irritating. When a friend paraphrases a past
conversation which an OCD Touretter participated in, the urge can be to
constantly correct their wording.
More fun than this is the mental tape player. This is the
ability to concentrate so hard on a song or dialogue from a TV show that you
can actually hear it. I'm not kidding
here! In the same way a mental impulse for movement gets turned
into an actual movement, the impulse for a sound can actually be turned into
hearing. Remember that hearing, like any other part of the body is
transmitted to your conscious by these little neurons sending their electric
shocks. Think hard enough about a sound, and you can trick the nerves
that control hearing that they've actually just heard it.
It's a wonderful trick, and one of the reasons I don't like taking
medications is that I lose this ability.
What can I say! The only thing better than a
Tourette dream is a Tourette dream on SSRIs! Recall comes in very
handy when dreaming. It adds a realism to familiar people in your dreams,
they look and sound exactly as in real life.
The latest theory on dreaming is that it is a form of housecleaning. At
the end of the day the brain strengthens the connections between important
pieces of information and discards the useless stuff. It does this with
what seems to be the only tool it has, it fires off random neuron
impulses. And once again the extra dopamine receptors strengthen these
signals. This causes a couple of things to happen. It firstly gives
you very vivid dreams, most of which are totally barmy and can be remembered in
the morning. I'm sure everyone has really odd
dreams, but many people just cannot remember them when they wake. It
also seems to reinforce the connections between the useless information as well
as the useful. As a result Touretters can often remember some really
trivial junk. Today, for example, I had a sudden
vision of a comment I made sitting in year 10 music class. I could
remember the moment so clearly, yet it was unimportant and not even
interesting. It just popped up from somewhere.
Another odd thing that this causes is serial dreams.
I have never heard of anyone having these except Touretters. Indeed, if I
happen to mention them in "normal" society I tend to get laughed at.
Serial dreams are dreams that pick up where another one left off. This is
not so odd if it happens on the same night, but in Touretters it can happen years
later. Sometimes you will dream of a venue, say a particular make believe
house that you explore. A couple of weeks later a completely different
plot, say you're running from someone, may bring you back to the same
house. You remember that you've been there before and you know your way
around because you explored it two weeks ago.
I can't
remember which famous person pondered whether this was the real world and
they dreamt at night or whether that was the real world and they were
dreaming now. But it wouldn't surprise me if they had a bit of the
serial dreaming going on...we create our own world that we visit when we
sleep. They don't usually follow any fixed laws, but they are the same
place.